Friday, June 12, 2015

Today’s Day of Russia ‘Holiday of Another Country,’ Shtepa Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, June 12 – Twenty-five
years ago, the RSFSR adopted a declaration of state sovereignty, an event Moscow
has marked in various ways and now calls the Day of Russia. But unlike all the
other Soviet republics which adopted similar declarations, Russia only briefly
viewed itself as a newly independent state, separate from the empire it had
been part of.

Russia’s
behavior in both these regards sharply “contrasts with that in other post-imperial
countries of the world,” which for the most part view “the day of the
proclamation of their sovereignty as the main national holiday,” he
writes.But “in Russia up to the present
has been retained a strange attitude toward this day.

At
best, Russians consider it an additional day off during which they can spend
time at their dachas. But given that it was often called “the Day of the
Independence of Russia,” many of them continue to view it “ironically” and ask “’From
whom did we become independent? From ourselves?’”

And
such attitudes thus show “a surprising continuation of the Soviet-imperial
mentality,” Shtepa suggests. Already in 1991, Russia declared itself the legal
successor of the USSR. “But if initially this succession was treated as a
strictly legal question, later it became ever more a worldview one.”

That
change was reflected in the change in Russia’s behavior in 1990-1991 when it
dealt with the other union republics on the basis of equality and with the non-Russian
republics within its borders as potential future states with which it had to
secure agreement by negotiation rather than force
majeure.

That approach, Shtepa says, is one of the
reasons why the disintegration of the USSR did not follow the Yugoslav model
and why Russia was originally interested in confederal approaches and agreed to
have the capital of the CIS be in Minsk, something that paralleled the decision
of the EU to have its centers in Brussels and Strasbourg.

But
Russia did not remain that way very long, Shtepa says. Instead, with each
passing year, it “ever more stressed its dominating role on the post-Soviet
space,” something that affected the political consciousness of Russians and
reinforced the increasingly authoritarian approach of the government.

In
December1991, “it was obvious to everyone that the USSR ceased its existence as
a result of an inter-governmental agreement of its creator republics,” he
notes.But “later ever more was
strengthened the propaganda stereotype as if the individual republics ‘separated
from Russia.’ This marked the transformation of federal thinking into
neo-imperial approach.”

The 1990 Declaration of Sovereignty “was the
triumph of Russian federalism” because “then there really was a massive desire
to build a genuinely new country which would secure broad rights to its
citizens and the subjects of the federation” and even be willing to create on a
voluntary and federal basis “’a renewed Union.’”

This all means, Shtepa continues,
that “it is wrong to accuse this Declaration of striving toward ‘the collapse
of the Union.’It only liquidated the
imperial ‘vertical’ of that time. But, regrettably,” he says, “this federative
model did not hold on for long.”

“The sad historical paradox is that
the ‘new Russia’ having won a victory over the August 1991 coup, later began to
reproduce its behavior,” Shtepa says. “This began already under Yeltsin with
the dispersal of a freely elected parliament, the beginning of a colonial
Caucasian war, and the monarchical model of transferring power to ‘the
successor.’”

Under Vladimir Putin, that trend
continued and intensified. Governors were no longer elected but became an
analogue of ‘the first secretaries’ appointed by the Kremlin ‘politburo.’ The melody
of the Soviet hymn returned.” The cult of Stalin was encouraged – something “completely
unthinkable in democratic Russia of the beginning of the 1990s.”

And consequently, “it has turned out
that contemporary Russia is in no way a new state but a literal continuation of
the USSR, only by some strange misunderstanding reduced in size.” But there has
been not only a Soviet restoration; there has been a claim of continuity from
the pre-Soviet Russian Empire, as absurd as the results of that sometimes are.

This latter “restoration of an
imperial heritage” has been clearly reflected in the growth of clericalism and
obscurantism.And it also means that “for
this neo-imperial consciousness, all remaining post-Soviet states are not
sovereign states but ‘separatist provinces’ which should be returned to the
bosom of ‘great Russia.’”

Not only does that mean that Russia’s
relations with her neighbors are “much worse” than they were at the time of the
collapse of the USSR, but it also means that while “the other post-Soviet
states … build their own new histories, present-day Russia somehow is going
into the past and trying to synthesize in itself two historically lost empires.”

And as a result, Shtepa concludes
sadly, the day of the proclamation of Russian sovereignty in 1990 now looks
like the holiday of some other country,” and the official celebration of it
like a day devoted to “the destruction of the Novgorod Republic with its veche”
by the Muscovite tsars.